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Click Convention 2007
Sep. 3rd, 2007 12:34 pmThe annual Clickteam convention was held in Hemel Hempstead as usual on September 1st, and sadly, once again I had nothing to do with it because of being half a world away surrounded by cheap TV and Americans. But there were a few pretty amazing things revealed there, some of which I wasn't expecting even though I had known bits and pieces of their plans for a while - some of this is almost as exciting as the release of MMF2 itself.
The biggest development is the announcement of a hardware accelerated runtime. This is something that it's sorely needed for a while, as when you're writing programs at that high a level you need all the help with speed that you can get. The demos might not look terribly impressive at first glance, but those are massive amounts of objects being scaled, rotated and recoloured in real time without ever dropping below 60FPS. I think that's more than enough than people will realistically need for writing games now, and I'm hoping that it will be an instant fix for the slightly worrying speed issues that have been coming up occasionally in my latest game. People who attended the convention got a beta version of the runtime, too, which surprised me - I hadn't thought they were anywhere near anything releaseable yet.
It's wrong to think so, but I'm also very happy with hardware acceleration because it represents a kick in the teeth to a company that nicked a lot of Clickteam's ideas and tried to bolt on some of the ones that they hadn't implemented. Hardware acceleration was their big advantage over Clickteam themselves, and with this news I had hoped to see them all muttering on the forum and shaking their fists Dick Dastardly-style, but nothing seems to have come up as yet.
The next big announcement is the idea of the Java runtime. This is another exciting idea for a different reason - in theory, it will allow MMF creations to be compiled to run on pretty much anything that has an implementation of Java. This means that the audience, which is currently Windows-only, will open up to Linux, Mac users, mobile phones, and a whole host of other things Realistically, not all Java implementations are the same and you can't just get something working on one system and effortlessly copy it over, but this is the first step in opening up Click to the rest of the world, and - what Clickteam really should be going for - handhelds. The really frightening bit of this is that I'm meant to be writing parts of it, so I hope I don't mess it up. I could never have imagined this situation after first getting KNP when I was ten.
And, finally, Vitalize 4 will be released before the end of September. It's not as vital as it was over a year ago (when they thought they'd release it) because of the Java runtime potentially allowing webpage-embedded applets anyway, but it's nice to have it finally materialize. The reasons for the massive delay are unknown, but apparently they're primarily due to Vista being the worst operating system in the world.
Now I'm going to have to go and bother someone for that hardware accelerated beta. Botherbotherbotherbother.
The biggest development is the announcement of a hardware accelerated runtime. This is something that it's sorely needed for a while, as when you're writing programs at that high a level you need all the help with speed that you can get. The demos might not look terribly impressive at first glance, but those are massive amounts of objects being scaled, rotated and recoloured in real time without ever dropping below 60FPS. I think that's more than enough than people will realistically need for writing games now, and I'm hoping that it will be an instant fix for the slightly worrying speed issues that have been coming up occasionally in my latest game. People who attended the convention got a beta version of the runtime, too, which surprised me - I hadn't thought they were anywhere near anything releaseable yet.
It's wrong to think so, but I'm also very happy with hardware acceleration because it represents a kick in the teeth to a company that nicked a lot of Clickteam's ideas and tried to bolt on some of the ones that they hadn't implemented. Hardware acceleration was their big advantage over Clickteam themselves, and with this news I had hoped to see them all muttering on the forum and shaking their fists Dick Dastardly-style, but nothing seems to have come up as yet.
The next big announcement is the idea of the Java runtime. This is another exciting idea for a different reason - in theory, it will allow MMF creations to be compiled to run on pretty much anything that has an implementation of Java. This means that the audience, which is currently Windows-only, will open up to Linux, Mac users, mobile phones, and a whole host of other things Realistically, not all Java implementations are the same and you can't just get something working on one system and effortlessly copy it over, but this is the first step in opening up Click to the rest of the world, and - what Clickteam really should be going for - handhelds. The really frightening bit of this is that I'm meant to be writing parts of it, so I hope I don't mess it up. I could never have imagined this situation after first getting KNP when I was ten.
And, finally, Vitalize 4 will be released before the end of September. It's not as vital as it was over a year ago (when they thought they'd release it) because of the Java runtime potentially allowing webpage-embedded applets anyway, but it's nice to have it finally materialize. The reasons for the massive delay are unknown, but apparently they're primarily due to Vista being the worst operating system in the world.
Now I'm going to have to go and bother someone for that hardware accelerated beta. Botherbotherbotherbother.
